The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Vendors of computer network equipment such as routers, switches, hubs, and other infrastructure elements may need to respond to requests from their customers for technical support. In present practice, the primary method of responding to a customer request for network support is through a face-to-face or telephone consultation with a customer support engineer. To evaluate the issue presented by the customer and determine a technical response, the responding engineer typically must perform the following tasks: request a brief description of the issue or problem; request customer network general profile information, such as what operating system version is used by customer devices, what network hardware is used by the customer, and what networking technologies and protocols the customer is using; and manually correlate the information provided by the customer to known bugs, fixes, patches, or other solutions.
The foregoing process is labor-intensive and, for a complex network, may require an extensive amount of information interchange between the responding engineer and the customer. Further, the process is workable only under limited conditions. For example, the number of network devices and configured network technologies needs to be relatively small; the correlation and analysis to be performed needs to involve analysis of relatively little information; and the responding engineer needs to have experience and apply a thorough approach. When the number of network devices is large, the complexity of performing this support process becomes impractical.
No past approach has provided a useful integrated view of attributes of a complex network or devices in such networks. In past approaches, network management systems such as Hewlett-Packard OpenView and CiscoWorks 2000/Resource Management Essentials, available from Cisco Systems, Inc., have provided flat table views or lists of device information for devices in a network. However, obtaining a rapid summary of this information, to provide an overall profile of the network, has not been provided. Further, answering detailed questions about networks has required support engineers or customer representatives to perform complicated database queries to obtain the needed information. In yet another prior approach, use of command-line interface commands such as “show <Tech Support>” has yielded a dump of a large volume of data that is difficult to correlate.
Based on the foregoing, there is a clear need for a way to generate network profile information to enable an individual to access a summary of devices, technologies, and features of a network and devices in the network.